George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one__ life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

The worship of power is an old religion.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

Depression is rage spread thin.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.